Litecoin is the result of some of us who joined together on IRC in an effort to create a real alternative currency similar to Bitcoin. We wanted to make a coin that is silver to Bitcoin's gold. Various alternative currencies have come and gone. Some brought innovation, but they all had problems.

Tenebrix - Lolcust premined 7.7 million coins. CPU proof of work using scrypt is very innovative. Price doing fairly well on btc-e.com. - Alive (~0.003 gh/s)

Fairbrix - Basically Tenebrix without the premine. First launch was crippled due to bad config. Relaunch attacked initially - Doing OK now, but no exchange so far. - Alive, but limping (~0.0001 gh/s)

We wanted the best innovations of Bitcoin and these other currencies to create a coin with all of their benefits, but nearly none of their problems.

Proof of Work

We really liked Tenebrix's Scrypt proof of work. Using Scrypt allows one to mine Litecoin while also mining Bitcoin. We humbly offer a big thanks to ArtForz for the implementation.

Premines

Litecoin will come with 150 premined coins: just the genesis block and the first 2 blocks to confirm the genesis is valid. We believe a coin needs to be released in a fair manner. Having one person (or a group) control a large amount of coins that can be used as they see fit is against the decentralized vision of Bitcoin. Yes, it is true that without a stash of premined coins, we will not be able to afford to pay for bounties, but we believe people will see the virtue of this coin, invest in it as early adopters, and will be willing to spend time creating services to make this coin better.

Fast transactions

We were impressed by the convenience of SolidCoin's fast transactions. Although we know that fast confirmations are not necessarily as secure as Bitcoin's slower confirmations, they are very convenient for small merchants who don't need transactions to be super secure. The average Litecoin block takes 2.5 minutes, one quarter of Bitcoin's 10 minutes. So if merchants wanted to be as safe as Bitcoin, they can wait for 4 times the number of Litecoin confirmations as compared to Bitcoin. But most merchants can readily accept 1-confirmed transactions for small amounts of litecoins.

Difficulty retarget

We will keep the retarget block the same as Bitcoin's 2016, but because blocks are found 4 times faster, difficulty will retarget about every 3.5 days. The combination of fast retarget times and Scrypt proof of work (Litecoin will not compete with Bitcoin for miners) means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashing power that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog for everyone who stayed.

Coin generation

Miners will generate 50 coins per block. In light of our faster blocks, to properly mimic Bitcoin's generation trajectory, we needed to change the blocks at which coin generation is halved. Bitcoin generation is halved every 210,000 blocks. Litecoin generation will be halved every 840,000 blocks. For those of you doing the math, Litecoin is scheduled to produce roughly 4 times as many coins as Bitcoin, about 84 million litecoins.

Fairness

We have come up with a plan that we believe is most fair. Some previous coins were released without Windows binaries or without source code; we consider this as unfair as it is unsafe.

We released the source code and binaries ahead of time... 3 days before launch. People had time to compile the source and run the client on their machines against the Litecoin testnet. So people were able to make sure everything was working well before the launch. We also had a poll so that people can vote for a launch time that best suits them. At the time of the launch (Oct 12 03:00 GMT), we released the genesis hash and everyone started mining at the same time. All it took was a simple change in the config file in order to mine the real coin instead of the testnet coin.

51% attack

The problem with alternative currencies is that the network hashrate is likely low when the coin starts up, making an easy target for any potential 51% attacker. With a little hope, a little prayer, a lot of hype, and due to our innovative release, there was a large hashrate from minute one. We believe this deterred any attackers from targeting this chain. As expected, there was a lot of natural orphaning of blocks, due to having so many people mining on the chain at once. With block locking at every difficulty change, we were able to avoid any attacks from succeeding. (if there were any)

Port is 9333. Open if on your router if you know how. This will allow you to have more than 8 connections.And default RPC port is 9332. This is the port miners will use to communicate with your client/daemon.

Sample litecoin.conf file:

Code:

server=1rpcuser=userrpcpassword=password

#Change this if you want to use a different rpc port for mining#rpcport=9332

#Only uncomment this if you are running litecoind and want to run Litecoin in the background (not Litecoin QT)#daemon=1

So tell us what you think. Come to the Litecoin forums (http://forum.litecoin.net) or drop by #litecoin or #litecoin-dev on freenode IRC to chat.

what's the difference between this and fairbrix? also, what's the guarantee that you won't get 51%'d and lose like a crapload of coins?

Fairbrix, like Tenebrix, has no cap in total number of coins. So it keeps inflating forever. Litecoin will have a cap similar to Bitcoin. Also, Fairbrix average transaction times is 5 minutes with 25 coins generated in a block. Litecoin is 2.5 minutes with 50 coins in a block.

One of the goals of Litecoin is to not change what's working (from Bitcoin) unless there was a good reason to. Litecoin is also forked directly form the Bitcoin source code, so it won't have any new security holes that doesn't plague Bitcoin also. One of the reason why the first Fairbrix launch failed so miserable is because it is a fork of Tenebrix, a fork of Multicoin, a fork of Bitcoin. And somewhere in those forks, a nasty bug crept in that caused things to go horribly wrong.

If you want your currency to succeed, you should add some innovative things, otherwise it will be just another one of these quick mine&dump currencies, then price/diff falls until the exchanges drop it...

A somewhat boring and formalistic question, but does Litecoin "sorta-officially" supersede Fairbrix (in the sense of, would efforts still be spared to organize infrastructure for fairbrix, or would said efforts be completely redirected to the benefit of Litecoin)?

Geist Geld, the experimental cryptocurrency, is ready for yet another SolidCoin collapse

Why do all these coins have to be called by a name whose sole function is to show a feature that they have that the original does not? Are we really going to be using Solidcoin, Litecoin, Speediercoin, Freecoin, or whatever other name people come up with in 20 years, and what are people supposed to think of the name? The only thing I know of with a reactionary name that has ever had any success is openoffice.org. All the other "hip alternatives" - Firefox, Linux, Android, etc. have names that stand on their own to someone who has never heard of the original, and that's what I like about Tenebrix (and GeistGeld).

Argumentum ad lunam: the fallacy that because Bitcoin's price is rising really fast the currency must be a speculative bubble and/or Ponzi scheme.

A somewhat boring and formalistic question, but does Litecoin "sorta-officially" supersede Fairbrix (in the sense of, would efforts still be spared to organize infrastructure for fairbrix, or would said efforts be completely redirected to the benefit of Litecoin)?

I will give support to Fairbrix as long as there is still interest in Fairbrix. I purposely tried not to position this as a replacement to Fairbrix because I wanted to give Fairbrix a fair chance. But if all Fairbrix miners switch over to Litecoin, then there will be no reason for supporting Fairbrix anymore. I guess we'll see.

Unfortunately, I'm not a windows guy. I built this on a WinXP running in a virtual machine. And I tried my best to include the necessary dlls and such. It works for me, but let me know if you have trouble.

Here's a windows client I built just now: https://github.com/downloads/coblee/litecoin/litecoin-windows-client-10-09-2011.zip

Unfortunately, I'm not a windows guy. I built this on a WinXP running in a virtual machine. And I tried my best to include the necessary dlls and such. It works for me, but let me know if you have trouble.

Do people need a download that has the miner also?

Just to make sure I understand, this download includes a miner within the GUI app?If so, then that's good enough for me, I don't need a standalone command line miner.

Here's a windows client I built just now: https://github.com/downloads/coblee/litecoin/litecoin-windows-client-10-09-2011.zip

Unfortunately, I'm not a windows guy. I built this on a WinXP running in a virtual machine. And I tried my best to include the necessary dlls and such. It works for me, but let me know if you have trouble.

Do people need a download that has the miner also?

Just to make sure I understand, this download includes a miner within the GUI app?If so, then that's good enough for me, I don't need a standalone command line miner.

Here's a windows client I built just now: https://github.com/downloads/coblee/litecoin/litecoin-windows-client-10-09-2011.zip

Unfortunately, I'm not a windows guy. I built this on a WinXP running in a virtual machine. And I tried my best to include the necessary dlls and such. It works for me, but let me know if you have trouble.

Do people need a download that has the miner also?

Just to make sure I understand, this download includes a miner within the GUI app?If so, then that's good enough for me, I don't need a standalone command line miner.

If no, then yes, miner please.

If you put "gen=1" in your litecoin.conf file, it will mine for you.

We will see statistics like hashrate, or any other confirmation that it's mining? This output from Tenebrix is very useful: